The American Scholar of the 
Twentieth Century 



An Address Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society 
of the Northwestern University 

By 
William Morton Payne, LL. D. 



& 



Reprinted from 

THE INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY, 

54a Fifth Avenue, New York City, 

Burlington, Vermont, 

December, 1903. 



The American Scholar of the 
Twentieth Century 



An Address Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society 
of the Northwestern University 



By 



William Morton Payne, LL. D, 



1 3 O » 1 » i > 



Reprinted from 

THE INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY, 

542 Fifth Avenue, New York City, 

Burlington, Vermont, 

December, 1903. 



V 






6 



-5 



Copyright, 1903, by 
Frederick A. Richardson 
Printed, Dec, 1903 



• • • 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR OF THE 
TWENTIETH CENTURY 

IN THE approach to my discussion of the present position of the 
American scholar, his opportunities and responsibilities, I do not 
wish to recall the fabled German professor who began his account 
of the Protestant Reformation with the creation of the world, or even 
the very modern instance of the southern statesman who found it 
necessary to base his argument for a Nicaraguan canal upon the Spanish 
conquest of America and the depressing influence of the Inquisition 
upon the native races of the western continent. Nevertheless, a refer- 
ence to Benjamin Franklin is what first comes to my mind, prompted by 
the vague reminiscence of having read, sometime in childhood, an account 
of how our shrewd eighteenth century philosopher, beginning life as a 
tallow-chandler's apprentice, raised himself by his own unaided efforts to 
a commanding rank among his fellow men, and eventually, — for this 
was the impressive moral of the story, — was enabled to u stand before 
kings." To the childish sense, this may seem a very imposing reward of 
ambition, but the maturer intelligence takes greater satisfaction in Turgot's 
famous epigrammatic characterization, " He snatched the thunder from 
heaven, and the sceptre from tyrants." Kings impress our imagination 
when we are young, but somehow they lose their glamor when we grow 
up, and learn, among other things, that they wear clothes like our own, 
and a high hat more frequently than a crown. 

We Americans, particularly, whose lives are consecrated to the ideal 
of democracy, are not likely to be overawed by any trappings of royalty, 
except in those tender years during which our individual development 
epitomizes the racial experience which we inherit. It has even been 
hinted, on the contrary, that we are apt to be over scornful of the out- 
worn past, and unduly assertive of our own superiority over the effete 
older world, with its life of tradition and prescription. I have heard a 
story of Charles Sumner to the effect that once when traveling in 
England, his consequential manner and air of importance so impressed 
observers that one of them, curious to learn what manner of personage 
he might be, and of what exalted rank, ventured to put the question 
directly to him. "Sir," was the reply, "I am an American sovereign." 
The statement was conclusive, and, if the story be not apocryphal, 



4 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

Sumner's way of making it is likely to have been such as to discourage 
further inquiries. 

American sovereigns were created in such numbers by the American 
Revolution that it could not seem so great a thing for Franklin, or another, 
to M stand before kings " unabashed by their artificial magnificence. As 
the result of that momentous happening, the individual acquired a new 
dignity, and the simple virtues of upright manhood came to be held a 
more important possession than quarterings or pedigrees. But there is a 
royalty of a different sort to which tribute may be paid by the most 
democratically minded without any loss of self-respect. It is the royalty 
that holds sway over the kingdoms of the intellect, and exacts a homage 
that we willingly bestow. So our American revolt was declared against 
Tory ministers and Hanoverian kings, but by no means against the 
spiritual rule of Shakespeare and Milton, which we continued gladly and 
reverently to acknowledge. Yet it must be confessed that, with political 
independence achieved, our nation remained unduly subservient to the 
literature and the scholarship of our mother country. It was one thing 
to give unqualified allegiance to the great poets and thinkers whose fame 
was the inheritance of Americans no less than of Englishmen; it was 
quite another thing to look across the seas for every fresh inspiration, to 
be doubtful of our own powers and self-deprecatory in all matters of 
intellectual achievement, to remain uncertain concerning the value of our 
own work until it had received the seal of transatlantic approval. One 
cannot read very far in the literature produced by the first half century 
of our national life without discovering this to have been the prevailing 
attitude, and the more widely we extend the inquiry the deeper becomes 
this impression. As Professor Lounsbury says, "It requires a painful 
and penitential examination of the reviews of the period to comprehend 
the utter abasement of mind with which the men of that day accepted 
the foreign estimate upon works written here, which had been read by 
themselves, but which it was clear had not been read by the critics whose 
opinions they echoed." What was thus true in the field of literary 
criticism was true in almost equal measure in the field of scholarship, 
and it was evident that our political emancipation had still left us intel- 
lectually in leading strings. One lesson of national self-reliance we had 
already learned ; another lesson, possibly the more important of the two, 
remained thus far unmastered, and almost unattempted. 

That lesson was to be enforced by the man whose life and teachings 
we have recently been commemorating in this the centenary anniversary 
of his birth. Many tongues and pens have united in paying tribute to 
Ralph Waldo Emerson during the past months, but the sum of our obli- 



WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE 5 

gation to his memory has hardly yet been computed. It is comparatively 
easy to reckon up the influence of a thinker who has made definite con- 
tributions to the totality of human knowledge, or who has propounded 
some new thesis of vital importance, and won for it the acceptance of 
the judicious by force of logical presentation and persistent champion- 
ship. We know pretty definitely what the world owes to such men as 
Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant and Charles Darwin. Their intellect- 
ual force is applied externally, so to speak, and its resultant is measurable. 
But Emerson was a thinker of different type, a philosopher whose prin- 
ciples defy formulation, and whose ideas have neither logical development 
nor systematic arrangement. He was the preacher of a gospel, not the 
defender of a creed, and no hobgoblin consistency was permitted to 
perturb his inspired musings. His influence was exerted upon the mind 
not externally, but from within outwards, and its aim was a sort of 
spiritual regeneration rather than the modification of any particular idea 
or set of ideas. As he once said, " It is of little moment that one or 
two or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much 
that man be in his senses." It was said with pregnant significance by 
Goethe, the greatest among all of the moderns of this type of intellect, 
that " inner freedom " was the thing which men should, above all things 
else, strive to attain ; that he felt it his chief title to the world's regard 
that his writings had been helpful in this direction. It will ever be the 
glory of Emerson that he aided many thousands of his fellow country- 
men to win this, the most precious of all spiritual possessions. By 
treating idealism as the natural atmosphere of the free soul, he responded 
to the deepest instincts of our nature, for all the encroachments of 
materialism upon American life cannot wholly conceal the fact that this 
nation was founded upon idealism, political, ethical, and religious, and 
that it still believes in the sunlit peaks, however they may be obscured 
by the sullen vapors of these lower slopes upon which we grope from 
day to day. The time came, long before Emerson's own death, when 
his gospel bore its proper fruit, when his idealism became translated into 
action, and when it was seen, as Mr. Morley finely says, that his " teach- 
ing had been one of the forces that, like central fire in men's minds, 
nourished the heroism of the North in its immortal battle." Thus was 
Emerson's faith in the individual justified, and thus it will be justified 
many times over, if we give heed to his counsel. That "the kingdom 
of God is within you" is a worthy and a memorable saying of old. 
"All deep souls see into that," to use a phrase from Carlyle, and the 
truth has been reiterated from age to age by the wisest among men. 
The most insistent spokesman of individualism in our own day is 



6 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

Henrik Ibsen, and his way of putting the matter is this : u Men still call 
for special revolutions, for revolutions in politics, in externals. But all 
that sort of thing; is trumpery. It is the human soul that must revolt." 
If we give this truth its rightful meaning, not misinterpreting it as an 
excuse for quietism, nor ourselves withdrawing from the arena under its 
shelter, we shall find it to be the very essence of every philosophy of 
reform, the prerequisite of every effective effort for the regeneration of 
our social life. 

At the close of the summer of 1787, the Fathers of the Republic 
were completing their arduous task of shaping that instrument of 
government which we call the Constitution of the United States, and 
which we hold in veneration as the fundamental law of a free com- 
monwealth based upon the principle of self-government. Thus did 
our ancestors give lasting political effect to the ideas of the Declara- 
tion of Independence. Exactly half a century later, on the closing 
day of the summer of 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson, then thirty- 
four years of age, addressed the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard 
College in words that burned themselves upon the minds of his hearers, 
and marked an epoch in the history of American thought. His theme 
was " The American Scholar," and his utterance has, by common con- 
sent, come to be known as our intellectual Declaration of Independence. 
The young men who heard this address, says Dr. Holmes, u Went out 
from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, c Thus saith the 
Lord ! ' From the very first paragraph, the address was a clarion call 
to the onset in our warfare of the spirit, a prophetic paean sublimely 
confident of the intellectual victories that our future must have in store. 
" Perhaps the time is already come," said the young speaker, " when the 
sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and 
fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than 
the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long 
apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The 
millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on 
the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise that must 
be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will 
revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, 
which now flames in our zenith, shall one day be the pole star for a 
thousand years ? " 

Let us pause for a moment to consider the leading ideas of this 
address, noting, in the first place, that Emerson is here more systematic 
than was his wont in after life, and that the address is constructed upon 
a definite intellectual plan. Beginning with the famous definition of the 



WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE 7 

scholar as u man thinking," as the " delegated intellect " in the social 
distribution of human functions, the essay goes on to discuss the attitude 
of the scholar toward the main influences that direct and shape his 
thought. " The education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by 
action,'' — such is the tripartite scheme of the first half of the argument. 
Nature is with him always, and "he must settle its value in his mind." 
The tendency to classify her phenomena is instinctive, and leads through 
gradual steps to the final synthesis in which nature and the soul are seen 
to be complementary, and the modern precept to study nature becomes 
one with the ancient exhortation to the most complete self-knowledge. 
Turning from nature to books, the essay admits the value of their influ- 
ence, but sounds a note of warning against over-dependence upon them, 
lest " men thinking " become no more than bookworms. u I had better 
never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own 
orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system." The influence of 
books must be " sternly subordinated to be free impulses of the active 
soul." Kept thus within their sphere, they are helpful and stimulating. 
" The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least 
part, — only the authentic utterances of the oracle, all the rest he rejects, 
were it never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare's." Thus viewed, 
reading becomes creation, and the reader remains in possession of his 
own soul. Next comes action, for it is by action that the soul really 
grows in stature. " The true scholar judges every opportunity of action 
past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the 
intellect moulds her splendid products." 

Thus far the essay is concerned with the scholar's education; the 
theme of the following section is found in a consideration of his duties. 
These u may all be comprised in self-trust," for the scholar must be both 
" free and brave." Such " being his functions, it becomes him to feel 
all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He 
and he only knows the world." " Let him not quit his belief that a 
popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm 
it to be the crack of doom." In patience, in sincerity with himself, and 
in complete self-reliance, the scholar bides his hour, and his brief exist- 
ence compasses all the eternities. " The unstable estimates of men 
crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth as the heaped waves of 
the Atlantic follow the moon." The man who is thus self-centred and 
self-trustful may " stand before kings " in the spiritual realm, for he is 
rightfully of their company. This sovereignty of the mind outranks all 
dynastic eminences, and is independent of all the forms of adventitious 
circumstance. "They are the kings of the world who give the color of 



8 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

their present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men by the 
cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they 
do is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, 
and inviting nations to the harvest." 

Finally, the essay proceeds to make its application of the principles 
discussed to American conditions as Emerson views them. He finds 
the age to be critical and discontented, its spokesmen uncertain concern- 
ing the past and hesitant in their attitude toward the future. But here is 
no cause for despondency; rather is there reason for exultation over the 
new vistas that open before the mind. " If there is any period one 
would desire to be born in, is it not the age of revolution ; when the 
old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when 
the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope ; when the 
historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of 
the new era ? " Reading the " signs of the coming days," the philoso- 
pher finds two of noteworthy import. The first is the entrance of 
democracy into literature, as illustrated by Goethe, Wordsworth, and 
Carlyle, with its fresh recognition of the common, the familiar, and the 
low. " Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful 
and wondrous than things remote." The other sign is " the new import- 
ance given to the single person." For " if the single man plant himself 
indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come 
round to him." And thus we reach those famous words which are the 
very essence of this declaration of our intellectual independence. "This 
confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs by all motives, by all 
prophecy, by all preparation, to the American scholar. We have listened 
too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American 
freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame." But hence- 
forth, " please God, we will walk on our feet ; we will work with our 
own hands ; we will speak our own minds. A nation of men will for 
the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine 
Soul which also inspires all men." 

Exactly two generations have passed by since these burning words 
fired the American spirit to a new and lofty purpose. It has seemed to 
me fitting, in this secular year of Emerson's birth, thus to recall his most 
pregnant message, and to inquire, such being the teaching inculcated 
upon our grandsires, what their grandsons should make of it, and in what 
spirit they should apply it to this new age in which we live. In its 
fundamental ideas, the teaching is no less vital today than it was when 
first delivered, for it rests upon the enduring principles of human nature, 
upon a rational interpretation of the relations between life and thought. 



WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE 9 

But, as Lowell reminded us long ago, " new occasions teach new duties," 
and it may well be that a somewhat different envisagement of the attitude 
of u man thinking " toward his fellow men will be found desirable in our 
own day and generation. 

It is with this thought in mind that the subject of the present essay 
has been chosen, and that I invite the attention of my readers to a con- 
sideration of the duties of the American scholar under the " form and 
pressure " of the time of whose body we are a part. Thus sheltering 
myself in the shadow of a great name, my only wish is that what I say 
may be seen in his light, and be found not inconsistent with the spirit of 
his teaching. 

The fulfillment of prophecy is not generally literal and Emerson's 
forecast offers no exception to this rule. It has ever been the fashion of 
oracles, from the time of the Sibyls and the Delphian tripod, to couch 
their deliverances darkly, and to prove themselves justified by the event 
in a fashion different from what was anticipated. But considered broadly, 
American scholarship has freed itself from the reproach of being " timid, 
imitative, and tame." It has done its part in the opening of new 
avenues of research, it has displayed qualities of marked originality, and 
it has grown bold in its self-reliance. In some of its manifestations it 
may be said to have bettered Emerson's instruction, and not to its advan- 
tage, for boldness may merge into recklessness, and impatience of 
restraint into lawlessness, while the desire to be original at all costs may 
lead to a wanton disregard for the example of other times and lands. 
Aversion to "the courtly muses of Europe" has sometimes driven us 
into a national chauvinism of empty self-conceit that Emerson would 
have been the last to countenance. But on the whole, we have no reason 
to be ashamed of our intellectual performance, for it has been widely 
varied, solid, and influential. Many of our younger scholars are equipped 
here at home with a training that means quite as much as any that the 
old world can give, many of our older scholars have acquired full citizen- 
ship in the cosmopolitan republic of learning. American scholarship has 
its own peculiar coloring, no doubt, for it is the reflection of American 
activities and aims, but it can hold its own in any company. If its 
accidents are not altogether what the most thoughtful might wish them 
to be, if the ideal of knowledge has crowded too closely on the ideal of 
culture, and the material has left the spiritual hard pressed for light and 
air, these are defects for the future to remedy, and to realize them that 
they may be remedied becomes one of the prime duties of the present 
day. 

Every man is " a debtor to his profession," as Lord Bacon long ago 



io THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

reminded us, and the educational profession is one that has special claims 
upon the American scholar. No matter what his department of work 
may be, he is bound to give his activity an educational turn, for this 
country, more fully perhaps than any other, accepts public education as 
one of the chief civic responsibilities. The great majority of our 
scholars are, indeed, and will long continue to be, engaged in the work of 
actual teaching, and those who are not so engaged, are usually in a posi- 
tion to exert a shaping influence upon our educational life. The com- 
plaint is often made that the advancement of learning suffers from this 
absorption in narrow educational tasks, and it would no doubt be desirable 
to free from that exaction a larger proportion of our scholarly energy 
than can now be devoted to research for its own sake. But it would be 
unfortunate indeed if scholarship should become wholly divorced from 
teaching, or if the duty to impart should not remain closely allied with the 
duty to investigate. The present time in this country is one of almost 
unexampled educational unrest, and more than ever before does it behoove 
the scholar to bring guidance to the forces at work, and to clarify the fer- 
ment. For, despite our generous public appropriations and our munificent 
private endowments for educational purposes, it is by no means true that all 
is roseate in this field of endeavor. There is still waste of the most wan- 
ton sort, and such misdirection of effort that a considerable share of the 
energy is dissipated. Particularly is this a time of reckless experimenta- 
tion and of a confused sense of educational values. The old and tried 
disciplines, whose effectiveness has been tested by ages of experience, 
are now forced to contend for supremacy with all sorts of upstart 
matters. Reasoning, apparently, upon the analogy offered by the equality 
of individuals in a democracy, we are gravely bidden to accept a demo- 
cratic system of education in which all subjects of study are held to be 
equivalent, and, to reduce the theory to its last absurdity, in which young 
people of all degrees of immaturity are encouraged to select their subjects 
according to their likings. The disciplinary aspect of education has in 
many quarters vanished clean out of sight, entertainment is offered in 
place of training, and the will, instead of being strengthened by the 
stimulation of its powers of resistance, is weakened by all sorts of con- 
cessions to the spirit of an easy-going self-indulgence. And all these 
evil things are done in the name of a sentimental pseudo-philosophy, 
with an imposing array of high-sounding terms at its command, whose 
pretensions are in reality as hollow as those of the veriest wind-bag giant 
of fairy lore. The peculiarly unfortunate feature of all this dallying 
with the new thing, this disregard of the accumulated wisdom of the 
generations, is that an incalculable amount of mischief may be done 



WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE n 

before the common sense of the people is aroused sufficiently to call a 
halt. This lesson is likely to be learned only at the expense of a whole- 
generation of luckless youngsters. Here, then, is a manifest duty of the 
American scholar toward his profession, to stand for a wise conservatism 
in educational theory and practice, to distrust all nostrums, and in the 
name of a sound psychology to expose and rebuke the mischievous ten- 
dencies of a pedagogy which is weakening the stamina of the new 
generation, and in which, while the teacher withers as an individual 
influence, the system is more and more. 

In the higher ranges of his profession, and in those which more 
immediately concern his personal occupation, the scholar has no clearer 
duty than that of standing for " Lehrfreiheit " in the most absolute sense. 
He must teach the truth as he sees it, and he must join with his fellow 
scholars in the determination that by every means in their power this 
freedom shall be kept inviolate. This does not imply that all truths are 
fit for all seasons and places, but it does mean that no paltering with 
truth is permissible in the exercise of the sacred function of scholarship. 
When the occasion for plain speaking comes, as come it must upon many 
occasions in the scholar's life, he can admit no compromise with error, 
for the spirit of compromise is no other than Satan, as Henrik Ibsen 
vehemently reminds us, and a man may have commerce with it only at 
the peril of his soul's salvation. The great French scholar who died 
only a few months ago has formulated in impressive words what must be 
the fundamental creed of all his guild. It was in 1870 that Gaston 
Paris, in a lecture at the College de France, spoke these noble words: — 
" I profess absolutely and without reserve this doctrine that science has 
no other aim than truth, and truth for its own sake, without care of the 
consequences, good or ill, regrettable or happy, which that truth may 
have in practice. He, who, from a patriotic, religious, or even from a 
moral motive, allows himself in the facts that he is studying, in the con- 
clusion that he draws, the smallest dissimulation, the slightest alteration, 
is not worthy of a place in the great laboratory to which truthfulness is 
a more indispensable claim to admission than skill. Thus understood, 
studies in common carried on in the same spirit in all civilized countries, 
form, above restricted, diverse, and often hostile nationalities, a great 
fatherland which no war soils, which no conqueror threatens, wherein 
souls find the refuge and the unity which the citadel of God gave them 
of old." It was Ernest Renan who asked that the words Veritatem 
dilexi should be graven upon his tombstone, and what nobler epitaph 
could any scholar wish than one that should inform passers-by that above 
all things else he delighted in the truth ? 



12 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

For he who stands by the truth in its hour of good and of ill repute 
alike steadfast to its banner, fights upon the winning side, and his per- 
sonal defeat will only advance the triumph of his cause. As St. Augus- 
tine said, u It is a good thing for a man that truth should conquer him 
with his consent, since it is a bad thing for a man that truth should con- 
quer him without his consent. For that truth conquer is necessary, whether 
he deny or confess." The proposition that truth must be served what- 
ever the personal sacrifice becomes in its converse statement the proposi- 
tion that falsehood must be combated whenever and wherever it raises 
its head. And on this aspect of the matter the words of the old theolo- 
gian may be supplemented by the words of the modern philosopher. 
In all the writings of Schopenhauer there is no more impressive passage 
than the following : " It has often been said that we ought to follow 
truth even though no utility can be seen in it, because it may have 
indirect utility which may appear when it is least expected, and I would 
add to this, that we ought to be just as anxious to discover and to root 
out all error even when no harm is anticipated from it, because its mis- 
chief may be very indirect, and may suddenly appear when we do not 
expect it, for all error has poison at its heart. If it is mind, if it is 
knowledge, that makes man the lord of creation, there can be no such 
thing as harmless error, still less venerable and holy error. And for the 
consolation of those who in any way and at any time may have devoted 
strength and life to the noble and hard battle against error, I cannot 
refrain from adding that, so long as truth is absent, error will have free 
play, as owls and bats in the night ; but sooner would we expect to see 
the owls and the bats drive back the sun in the eastern heavens, than 
that any truth which has once been known and distinctly and fully 
expressed, can ever again be so utterly vanquished and overcome that 
the old error shall once more reign undisturbed over its wide kingdom. 
This is the power of truth ; its conquest is slow and laborious, but if 
once the victory be gained it can never be wrested back again/' 

The spirit of easy toleration of ills which a little resolution would 
remedy has given a distinctive stamp to the American character. As a 
people, we are inclined to put up with many forms of evil in the material, 
social, and intellectual spheres simply because their pressure has not 
grown intolerable. We fall too easily into a state of apathy and of 
complacent acceptance of things as they are, and our resentment is slow 
to be aroused. That it may be most effectively aroused at a critical 
juncture has been shown at many times in our history, and in this fact 
is the saving element of an otherwise dangerous tendency. Too often, 
however, the crisis past, we sink back into our sluggish mood, and our 



WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE 13 

life resumes the old round of indifference and self-delusion and folly. 
The lessons of experience are too quickly forgotten, and we are forced 
to learn over and over again under the sharp stress of impending disaster. 
In the sphere of thought, this spirit leads us to condone all sorts of 
lapses from intellectual integrity, and to sanction all sorts of pernicious 
mental practices. We gloss over a disagreeable situation with plausible 
phrases, and, while giving lip service to our ideals, ignore them in our 
actions. But that way lies hypocrisy, which of all the intellectual vices 
must ever be the ugliest to the earnest thinker. It infects our higher 
life at every point, and discredits our religion, our politics, and our social 
philosophy alike. Of all the prayers which we offer up for spiritual well- 
being, we should repeat most frequently and most fervently this prayer 
of Carlyle's : " May the Lord deliver us from all cant. May the Lord, 
whatever else he do or forbear, teach us to look facts honestly in the 
face, and to beware (with a kind of shudder) of smearing them all over 
with our despicable and damnable palavar, into unrecognizability, and so 
falsifying the Lord's own gospels to his unhappy blockheads of children, 
all struggling down to Gehenna and the everlasting swine's-trough for 
want of gospels." 

It is a hard saying, albeit a racy one, this remark of Carlyle's about 
"the everlasting swine's-trough," but it characterizes an aspect of our 
civilization that cannot be ignored, and that should give us pause in our 
seasons of rejoicing and self-glorification. Even the gentle Emerson, in 
whose composition indignation was lacking, and the chief defect of 
whose philosophy is its failure to face the problem of evil, was driven to 
denounce "the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism," and 
to declare, in the very address that has supplied a text for the present 
discourse, that " public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick 
and fat." If this were true two generations ago, with how much more 
of truth must the charge be made today, when in the minds of the great 
majority of our fellow countrymen material prosperity is the chief 
measure of worldly success. Do we not as a people frequently set before 
ourselves for examples the men who have accumulated stores of wealth 
rather than the men who have accumulated stores of wisdom ? Do we 
not sometimes even acclaim them as our leaders, forgetful of Jethro's 
ancient counsel, "Thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, 
such as fear God, — men of truth, hating covetousness " ? Here is surely 
an opportunity for the American scholar, — to protest not so much by his 
words as by his life against the prevailing commercial standards, to 
emphasize the dignity of his calling by showing himself calmly superior 
to the allurements that prove so dazzling to other men, to bring back to 



14 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

us by the force of his example that ideal of plain living and high thinking 
which was once a potent force in our national life, but from which our 
civilization has in these later years so sadly lapsed. That scholar is 
unworthy of his high office who joins in the querulous complaint raised 
now and again to the effect that scholarship does not command material 
rewards proportional to those won by other forms of endeavor. Are its 
own peculiar rewards to count for nothing then, — its honors, its self- 
sufficing activities, its sense of the esteem in which it is held by all whose 
approval is really worth having ? The true scholar, rejoicing in his work, 
and knowing it to be good, will reck little of the prizes for which the 
vulgar strive ; he will think of nothing less than of success in the worldly 
sense, as the free man, in Spinoza's immortal saying, " thinks of nothing 
less than of death." 

The rising tide of that movement which in the political sphere we 
call socialism, but which has many other manifestations as well, and 
which threatens to subdue the brightly colored world to a uniform hue of 
sober gray, constitutes one of the most insidious present dangers to 
scholarship. In the name of a social ideal almost wholly materialistic, 
and under the protection of a narrow interpretation of the utilitarian 
philosophy, this movement is everywhere seeking to weaken individual 
initiative and thus clog the feet of progress. Emerson apprehended this 
danger, and commented upon it with a vehemence quite out of keeping 
with his wonted placidity. "Is it not the chief disgrace in the world," 
he said, "not to be an unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to 
yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be 
reckoned in the gross, in the hundred or thousand, of the party, the 
section, to which we belong, and our opinion predicted geographically, 
as the North, or the South ? " It was an unerring instinct which led 
Emerson to put his finger upon this tendency, and mark it as dangerous 
to civilization. I might quote similar words of warning from such differ- 
ent types of men as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Henry Huxley, and 
Henrik Ibsen. Huxley was the one who supplied us with a name for 
this tendency. He called it regimentation by way of contrasting it with 
individualism, and proceeded to analyze the history and theory of the two 
opposing systems in the sphere of governmental action. But it is a con- 
trast which may be illustrated in the realm of thought no less than in 
that of action, and the scholar is quite as much concerned with it as the 
politician. In view of the ever increasing encroachments of the method 
of regimentation upon our modern life, it seems to me that the duty of 
the scholar is pronounced to take his stand in the defence of that 
individualism which was the core of Emerson's philosophy, yet avoiding 



WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE 15 

the extreme of intellectual anarchy to which an unrestrained acceptance 
of that view might lead, and admitting the helpfulness of concert 
wherever its aid may be invoked without harm to character or without 
clipping the wings of free thought. 

Whatever the work that may engage his attention, the American 
scholar is bound by every sacred obligation to put ethical purpose into his 
effort, and to recognize the claims upon him of the society to which he 
belongs. He has no right to the self-indulgence of the recluse, and 
indifference to the public weal must be to him more than to other men a 
shame. No man is less entitled to escape from the press, to scan the 
follies of his fellows unconcerned, to say " a mad world, my masters," 
and hold himself aloof from its turmoil. For if it be a mad world, upon 
him chiefly devolves the responsibility for its conversion to sanity, and to 
shirk this responsibility is the great refusal for which there is no forgive- 
ness. It may be, indeed, that the world will demand of him something 
more than clear thought and wise council, that duty may call upon to 
make the final sacrifice for the good of his fellow men. The sons of 
Harvard who fell in the struggle for the preservation of our American 
national life were in very truth what Lowell called them : — 

"Her wisest scholars, those who understood 
The deeper teaching of her mystic tome, 

And offered their fresh lives to make it good." 

This ideal of scholarship, its conception enlarged until it becomes coin- 
cident with citizenship, is nobly expressed in the inscription which occurs 
in a painting of the last judgment which adorns the great hall of the 
Ducal Palace in Venice. " Those are to be accounted wise who, by 
their own, avert their country's perils, for they render to the republic the 
honor which is its due, and would rather perish for, than with, many. 
For it is desperately wicked that we should treasure for ourselves the life 
which nature bestowed for our country's service; to surrender it at nature's 
demand, but refuse it when our country asks it. Wise, too, must they be 
accounted who shun no danger in their country's service. This is the 
price we are bound to pay for the dignity we enjoy in the republic, this 
the foundation of our liberty, this the wellspring of justice." In such 
stately terms was wisdom defined by the little island republic of the 
Adriatic ; our own continental republic, its shores washed by two oceans, 
will hardly be able to better that instruction, or improve upon that ideal 
of devotion to the commonwealth. 

In the familiar Pauline statement of the abiding elements in the 
Christian life, the chief emphasis is placed upon love, which is exalted 



1 6 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

above both faith and hope in the hierarchy of the cardinal virtues. Hav- 
ing in view the needs of the person alone, of the individual soul aspiring 
toward the divine, this emphasis is justified, and two thousand years of 
Christian teaching have enforced the apostolic precept. But from our 
present standpoint, having in view the development of the race rather 
than of the individual, it would seem that faith were the foremost con- 
sideration. Faith, that is, not in a creed or a body of doctrine, but in 
the validity of every fine, altruistic impulse, of every generous motion of 
the spirit. A faith that derives its sustenance from the contemplation of 
earth and sea and sky, from the forms of beauty created by architects 
and painters and musicians, from the inspired utterances of sages and 
prophets and poets. A faith that is proof against all frustrations and 
disappointments and disillusionments because it views all temporal phe- 
nomena under the species of eternity. A faith in the perfectibility of 
mankind which can turn, like that of Tennyson, from the most unflinch- 
ing envisagement of present-day evils, — from u the passions of the primal 
clan," from wisdom pilloried in the market-place, from the menace and 
the madness of a degenerate age, — turn serenely and with undimmed 
vision from all the disheartening spectacle to man as he may yet become 
when the aeons "touch him into shape": — 

"All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade, 
Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade, 

Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choric 
Hallelujah to the Maker, * It is finished. Man is made ! * " 

It is a faith of this fervent and invincible type that shines out in 
some of the darkest hours of modern history, and enshrines for us the 
memory of the men who have held it fast. Examples from the poets 
and seers of the modern world might be multiplied indefinitely, but I 
choose rather to direct attention to men who have been both thinkers and 
doers, to men who have been scholars in Emerson's sense, if not also in 
the narrower and more exacting sense of the term. First of all, there is 
the familiar passage from Condorcet's " Progres de PEsprit Humain." 
" How this picture of the human race freed from all its fetters, withdrawn 
from the empire of chance, as from that of the enemies of progress, 
and walking with firm and assured step in the way of truth, of virtue, 
and happiness, presents to the philosopher a sight that consoles him for 
the errors, the crimes, the injustice, with which the earth is yet stained, 
and of which he is not seldom the victim ! It is in the contemplation of 
this picture that he receives the reward of his efforts for the progress of 
reason, for the defence of liberty. He ventures to link them with the 



WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE 17 

eternal chain of the destinies of man. It is there that he finds the true 
recompense of virtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good. Fate 
can no longer undo it by any disastrous compensation that shall restore 
prejudice and bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into 
which the recollection of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, 
living in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his 
nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, 
by envy; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium 
that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love for 
humanity adorns with all purest delights." These words, as Mr. Mor- 
ley points out in telling phrase, were " written by a man at the very close 
of his days, when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one 
without the eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and 
barbarism." An equally sublime faith was voiced by Mazzini at a time 
when the spirit of Italian liberty seemed well nigh extinct, and when to 
prophecy its rebirth was like preaching the resurrection of the dead to 
an unbelieving generation ; " Faith and the Future " was his theme, and 
in eloquent terms he proclaimed that faith should once more be restored 
to its throne in the minds of men, and the future made fair. " And 
then," he went on to say, " made fruitful by the breath of God and of 
holy beliefs, poetry, now exiled from a world that is a prey to anarchy, 
will blossom yet again ; poetry, the flower of the angels, that martyrs' 
blood and mothers' tears have fed, that oft will grow amid ruins, but is 
ever colored by a rising sun. It speaks to us in prophetic tones, of 
humanity, European in substance, national in form. It will teach the 
Fatherland of the Fatherlands to the nations still divided ; it will trans- 
late into Art the religious, social philosophy, it will surround with its 
own beautiful light, woman, who, though a fallen angel, is ever nearer 
to heaven than we. It will hasten her redemption, restoring to her the 
mission of inspiration, of pity, and of prayer, which Christianity divinely 
symbolized in Mary. It will sing the joys of martyrdom, the immor- 
tality of the vanquished, the tears that expiate, the sufferings that purify, 
the memories and the hopes, the traditions of one world interwoven in 
the cradle of another, — and it will teach the young the greatness of self- 
sacrifice, the virtue of constancy and silence, how to be alone and yet 
despair not, how to endure without a cry an existence of torments half 
understood, unknown, long years of delusions and bitterness and wounds, 
all without a complaint, it will teach a belief in future things, an hourly 
travail to promote it, without a hope in this life of seeing its victory." 
It was a faith of this type, bound up with a passionate patriotism, that 
filled the soul of James Darmesteter, a scholar in the fullest sense, yet 



1 8 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

also a dreamer, whose life was cut off in his early prime. This vision 
of France as she stood revealed to him in the light of history, is taken 
from the tribute paid to his memory by the English poet whom he had 
made his wife. " The profound determination of France not to die, not 
to fall from her proud estate, not only to have like other nations her share 
of sunlit life, but to remain, in the future as in the past, one of the 
guiding forces of humanity, continued to be the infallible motive power 
that impelled her, straightforward and upright, along the strange paths in 
which she was drawn by her blind guides. Thus, from those pygmy 
conflicts in which she seemed resigned to let her light die out, there 
arose an eternal France, a France of today and of tomorrow, made up 
of her clear sky and her fertile soil, of her wealth amassed in toil, in 
glory, and in pursuit of the ideal, by sixty generations of laborers, 
scholars, and thinkers, of the gleam of her sword and the echo of her 
word, borne as far as mankind exists. That is a heritage not to be 
destroyed by six months of defeat and twenty years of fever, that the 
inheritor himself may neither reject nor squander, for the heritage con- 
strains the inheritor, however he may be disappointed or in whatever 
manner he may deal with it, even were he the sovereign people. That 
is the immanent France of which our foolish and shifting agitations are 
but fugitive phases without lasting effect ; the sole great and durable 
reality, invisible yet ever present, present in every Frenchman, in those 
who deny their country and in those who proclaim her, toward which all 
faces are turned in the hour of anguish." These three illustrations of 
the fortitude of soul that faith in the future alone can give, have for their 
common factor an unwavering confidence in the ultimate triumph of 
right over wrong and of light over darkness. Each of them in its own 
way, and with its own individual accent, points to a future humanity 
upheld by what Henrik Ibsen calls the true pillars of society, the twin 
pillars of truth and justice. 

It is the highest duty of the American scholar in our new century to 
uphold, not merely the faith in humanity to which these voices have 
borne testimony, but also the special faith that to our own nation has 
been given the mission to lead the world toward a true conception of the 
fellowship of man, that the new world has, indeed, been divinely 
appointed " to redress the balance of the old." That democracy must 
in the end prevail in the societies of human beings who are worthy to be 
called men, was held to be truth unquestionable by the Fathers of the 
Republic, and whatever strength has hitherto nerved us in the great crises 
of our national life has been born of that belief, — our splendid heritage 
from those who have gone before us and whose example we are fain to 



WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE 19 

emulate. In our own day, that belief has found no lack of advocators, 
and among them we hold in most grateful remembrance that fine flower 
of American scholarship and American manhood whose Birmingham 
address on " Democracy " offers the most persuasive and convincing 
modern exposition of our political gospel. James Russell Lowell seems, 
indeed, to have been the ideal American scholar of Emerson's prophecy. 
Singularly receptive to the benign ministries of nature, he was also at 
home in the world of books, yet he never allowed books to usurp for 
him the claims of life. And when the pressure of events called upon 
him to act, he stepped buoyantly into the arena, and bore his share of 
the brunt of the conflict. He held, moreover, that the duties of scholar- 
ship were paramount to its privileges, and shirked no task that was set 
him to perform, cast aside no burden that was laid upon his shoulders. 
And to all his life-activity he brought the moral fervor that had come 
down to him from the generations of his Puritan ancestry, and nursed 
the fire of his indignation until it became a devouring flame upon all 
those who sought selfish aims at the expense of the commonwealth. 
How we have missed him during these dark recent days, when democracy 
has been so sorely wounded in the house of her friends ! How we have 
longed to hear his voice raised to rebuke the miserable evasions and con- 
cealments and palterings with truth that have prevailed in our public 
councils of late ! How we have felt the need of his moral authority to 
reclaim us from recreancy to our national ideals, from desertion of the 
fundamental principles upon which is based whatever we have achieved 
of true greatness, from the casting loose of the very moorings of the 
Republic ! For it must be confessed that democracy is undergoing a 
severer strain than was ever before imposed upon it, and it takes a stout 
faith not to quail under this trial. The horizon of our new century is 
not, like that of its predecessor, arched by the rainbow of promise after 
the storm of revolution, but is obscured by miasmatic vapors and sullen 
exhalations wherein lurk the dragons of greed and brutality and sordid 
materialism. Instead of sweeping to their fulfilment, the hopes of a 
hundred years ago have grown sluggish in their flight, their pinions 
wearied, their anticipated goal withdrawn into the dim, uncertain distance. 
When the youthful poets of today shall have grown to maturity, they 
will hardly say of this age what Wordsworth could say of the earlier one, 

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very heaven." 

They will rather, if they have kept their idealism clean from the con- 



zo THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

tagion that now through so many insidious channels seems to pollute the 
springs of spiritual health, turn to the past more for chastening than for 
inspiration, determined that, as far as in them lies, its weaknesses and 
insensate follies shall not be those of the coming years. 

And in this there is perhaps a gain. For the past is past, and there 
is no undoing it. The old Tent-Maker of Naishapur was impelled by 
this solemn consideration to one of his most impressive sayings : — 

"The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ, 
Moves on : nor all your Piety nor Wit 

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, 
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it." 

But the future still remains to be shaped by man's resolution, and "the 
eternal years of God" belong to truth and righteousness. He who holds 
fast to this belief has indeed " the faith that makes faithful," and for him 
the spectres of the dead ages can possess no terrors. The most efYective 
worker for man's advancement is not he who blinks the evils that con- 
front him in the actual world, and takes refuge in some fool's paradise of 
the imagination, but he who faces them with open eyes and undaunted 
courage. Evils there are always and everywhere ; I have not hesitated 
to express the belief that they are crowding upon us here and now as v if 
marshaled for one desperate and decisive 

" Battle in the West, 
Where all of high and holy dies away.*' 

Yet I would fain that my closing word were one not of admonition, but 
of cheer, and that word may fitly be taken from the poet of the stout 
heart whose ringing summons has come to many a soul in the hour of 
need, and strengthened it for renewed endeavor. Robert Browning's 
last message to mankind teaches a lesson from which the poorest spirited 
may gain strength and courage. It would not be easy to find a more 
inspiring example for the conduct of life than is offered by the poet's 
description of himself as 

"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake." 



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